by publisher – Page 28 – Retraction Watch

“We thank Dr. Elisabeth Bik for drawing the irregularities to the authors’ attention.” A sleuth earns recognition.

A trio of researchers in Argentina is up to three retractions, and may well lose even more papers, for doctoring their images. And, in an unusual move, one of the leading data sleuths is getting credit for her work helping to out the problematic figures.

One article, “Apocynin-induced nitric oxide production confers antioxidant protection in maize leaves,” appeared in 2009 in the Journal of Plant Physiology, published by Elsevier. The authors were affiliated with the Universidad Nacional de Mar del Plata.

As the retraction notice states:

A tale of one exceedingly clear retraction notice, and two nonexistent ones

In the market for an admirably clear and concise retraction notice? Look no further!

A researcher in China has lost one — well, maybe two, more on that in a moment — 2015 articles for falsification of data and other misconduct. And one of the journals he tried to dupe is having none of it.

The papers appeared in Tissue Engineering, which is published by Mary Ann Liebert. A related, but yet unretracted, article was in the Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Medicine, a Springer title. The focus of the case is Xing Wei, of the, National Engineering Research Center of Genetic Medicine at Jinan University, in Guangzhou.

Here’s the retraction notice:

A mystery: “none of the authors listed had any involvement with or knowledge of the article”

Even after close to 10 years of writing about retractions every day, some days we read retraction notices that make us say, “huh?”

Today is one of those days.

Take this retraction notice for “High-resolution ultrasound images in gouty arthritis to evaluate relationship between tophi and bone erosion,” a paper first published in Future Generation Computer Systems last year:

Journal slaps 13 expressions of concern on papers suspected of being from a paper mill

The journal Artificial Cells, Nanomedicine, and Biotechnology has attached expressions of concern to 13 papers published in 2019 that a group of sleuths have flagged for potentially being from a paper mill.

In February, Elisabeth Bik wrote on her blog:

Based on the resemblance of the Western blot bands to tadpoles (the larval stage of an amphibian, such as a frog or a toad), we will call this the Tadpole Paper Mill.

Bik explains in her post that she and her colleagues — including pseudonymous sleuths @MortenOxe, @SmutClyde, and @TigerBB8 — had been working on a set of 17 papers that Jennifer Byrne and Jana Christopher had also been scrutinizing:

‘I shot at my own foot with my own gun’: Journal rebuffs attempt at un-retraction

An Elsevier journal has denied the efforts of a group of researchers — well, most of them, anyway — to reverse a retraction after having agreed to the move in the first place.

The dispute centers on a 2018 paper in Preventive Medicine Reports titled “Association between low-testosterone and kidney stones in US men: The national health and nutrition examination survey 2011–2012” — which, as the title implies, found that:

Fake peer review, made-up author take down a paper

Manipulated peer review strikes again, this time with a 2015 article whose authors appear to have created a straw mathematician to make their work seem more legit.

The paper, “Fixed point theorems and explicit estimates for convergence rates of continuous time Markov chains,” appeared in Fixed Point Theory and Applications, a Springer Nature title.

Its authors, purportedly, were affiliated with institutions in China and Japan. According to the acknowledgements for the article:

Heavily criticized paper blaming the sun for global warming is retracted

A controversial paper claiming that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field could be driving global warming has been retracted — prompting protests from most of the authors, who called the move

a shameful step to cover up the truthful facts about the solar and Earth orbital motion reported by the retracted paper, in our replies to the reviewer comments and in the further papers.

The 2019 article, “Oscillations of the baseline of solar magnetic field and solar irradiance on a millennial timescale,” appeared in Scientific Reports and was written by a group of authors from the UK, Russia and Azerbaijan. The first author was Valentina Zharkova, a mathematician/astrophysicist at Northumbria University, whose group reported having received funding for the work from the U.S. Air Force and the Russian Science Foundation.

The paper purported to find that fluctuations in the sun’s magnetic field are making the earth hotter:

Software error grounds pigeon-smarts paper

Pigeons definitely get a bad rap. Some might consider them mere rats with wings, purveyors of pestilence, distributors of dung, but rock doves aren’t, well, as dumb as their name might suggest. Pigeons are perhaps the world’s most accurate homers, they seem to have an innate knack for game theory and they can detect breast cancer in mammograms better than many doctors.

So when researchers in Germany reported in 2017 that pigeons were as adept, if not better, than people in multitasking, the findings seemed plausible. The study, which appeared in Current Biology, garnered a bit of media attention, including this piece in The Scientist, and has been cited five times, according to Clarivate Analytics Web of Science.

Turns out, that was a flight of fancy.

Retractions could mean fewer submissions for journals, says new analysis

What affects the number of submissions a journal receives? A new study in Learned Publishing, led by staff at Wiley, aimed to find out — and the results, based in part on our database, suggest that retractions may correlate with submission numbers. We asked corresponding author Thomas Gaston to answer a few questions about the paper.

Tell us about your study — why and how you did it, and what you found.

Entire board of law journal resigns in a ‘small act of resistance’

The defense resigns.

The entire editorial board of the European Law Journal, along with its two top editors, has quit over a dispute about contract terms and the behavior of its publisher, Wiley.

In a statement posted on the blog of the European Law Blog, editors-in-chief Joana Mendes, of the University of Luxembourg, and Harm Schepel, of the University of Kent, in England, wrote:

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